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A post from our friend & colleague American University Prof. Amy Eisman, Journalism Division, SOC

I attended the Knight-backed We Media conference in Florida last week, an annual confab of journalists, CitJs, digital media execs, educators, big thinkers and beyond. The focus was supposed to be on community, which digital honcho Merrill Brown called the "most important" topic on the Web today.

Panelists and yakkers included futurists, pollsters, youngsters, Second Lifers ("Adam Reuters"), Craig Newmark, U. of Miami prez Donna Shalala (who said she consulted blogs, among other resources, before picking a football coach), TIME Inc., MTV, BlogHer, Fast Company, Gannett (full disclosure: I do Web training projects for them), bloggers, taggers and more.

While the (sigh, still passionate, still tiresome) anger about the values of user-generated content vs. mainstream media kept elbowing its way into the room, the meeting put forth a few concepts that were fresh, at least to me.

I like the idea of content digitally following us around the Web:

  • NYT futurist-in-resident Michael Rogers said true legal identities will travel with us around the Internet (see We Media blog);
  • Rogers also said millennials will take their social networking technology with them into the future -- and into the work world (Facebook at the office?);
  • And 24-year-old John Fischer of Infinia Foresight said to young social networkers, "whether you are aware of it or not, you leave a shadow on the Internet. We call it a digital aura." (No wonder some of the teen panelists said they limited their MySpace information after hearing a lecture from Miami-Dade police.)

One of my favorite concepts came from MTV and repeated by others. It was a call to reward community contributions and participation for good deeds, rather than reward people for posting violent video on YouTube.

The funniest moment came from Craig Newmark of Craigslist, grappling with all the protocols to correct his profile on wikipedia. He wondered aloud: Aren’t I an expert on me?